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Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Much has been made of fans "demanding" a new ending to BioWare's Mass Effect 3. The line we've seen drawn in the sand by industry and media types in the gaming sphere is that a new ending would threaten the "artistic integrity" of the work, its creators, and the gaming industry itself.

Alyssa Rosenberg makes a very astute point about how commercial art is already influenced far more by the businesses pulling the strings than it will ever be distorted by fans:

In any case, while it’s true that trying to be responsive to every bit of shippery and every fan desire would break just about any piece of entertainment, it’s also true that there are costs to be paid when commercial artists—and that’s what most folks who make mainstream television shows, video games, and movies are—submit to edits from the businesses that finance them, too. While fans may want to see a pairing happen, a studio may want a character to be thinner, or blonder, or for a show or movie to kill off a black character first. Ultimately, corporate expectations probably have a more deleterious effect on our entertainment as a whole, while answering to legions of fans would take its toll in terms of the integrity and coherent of individual stories. It’s a neat corporate trick to make the latter more visible, and to suggest it’s worse.

It is a neat trick. Sleight of hand, really.

I think a really important piece of this puzzle, however, is that games are not like movies or books or television shows. All three of these things require only passive participation in the story and its outcome. We may not like the ending of this or that movie, but we didn't spend several dozen hours working to get there either.

I may complain about the fifth George R. R. Martin book, or rage against J.J. Abrams and Lost but I realize that I simply followed the characters in those works, I wasn't one of them.

Not even all games really ask us to participate in the course of events, for that matter.. A game like Uncharted 3 is essentially a play-along-movie. You don't make choices, you simply beat the levels, watch the cut-scenes, and solve a few really easy puzzles. Meanwhile the game feels a great deal like an Indiana Jones movie, right up to its conclusion. If fans were mad about the end of Uncharted 3, demanding a new ending might be a little silly. After all, they didn't have any say about how the rest of the story progressed either.

Mass Effect 3, and many other games for that matter, actually does ask (and require) gamers themselves to play a very big role in how events shake out. This fundamentally changes the dynamic between gamers and creators, usually for the better.

But when players at the end feel as though they've been pigeon-holed into essentially three different color-coded endings that are basically one and the same, it's not particularly surprising or unfair of them to be upset and demand changes. When you've been told that your active participation in a game will alter its ending, and it doesn't, this is quite a far cry from being upset by the end of a film.

The nature of modern gaming is one of endless tinkering. With computer games released by outfits like Valve or Bethesda, the mod community constantly tinkers and makes changes (all of which are optional for any gamer) and yet modding has not been decried as a threat to "artistic integrity."

And of course, DLC (downloadable content) is becoming more and more common, adding new content to a game that can do just about anything - including provide alternate endings that are, again, totally optional. Nothing about new options to a game filled already to the brim with options threatens the artist.

But I think the fact that Alyssa brings up - that corporate strings are pulled all the time when creative people are out to make money - cannot be overstated. The flipside to this coin is that the customer is going to determine the bottom line in the end. As a video game developer you may have to answer to corporate and make changes you disagree with because you don't have creative control, but listening to customers is even more important.

No, of course a developer or TV producer or any other content creator will never be able to cater to every fan demand. Nor should they. But then again, not every game is met with demands for new endings, at least not to the level we've seen with BioWare's latest effort.

This is all just the cost of doing business. You can't complain that much about your corporate overlords if you want to make money selling games you've developed because that's just the nature of the beast. The same applies to fans. It doesn't matter if that's a curse or a blessing. In the end, it's just the way of the world.